Rosemary Elliot, one of the owner-managers of Cairellot day nursery, says she has not had to advertise for staff for at least the past year. She puts the nursery's ability to retain staff down to its high-powered training programme, which has seen it receive numerous awards and prompted enterprise minister Wendy Alexander to celebrate its success.
Ms Elliott, who set up the 62-place day nursery with a friend, Ann Cairns, in 1993, said, 'We recruit staff from the Government's Skillseekers programme for 16- to 25-year-olds, offer them training and they stay with us. They become qualified nursery nurses, and then they can do assessor training and become internal verifiers. We believe in our staff growing with us. We are hoping to show them that you can have a career path in childcare.'
Cairellot delivers SVQs 2 and 3 and Modern Apprenticeships in early years care and education, and also offers peripatetic training to other daycare centres, supported by the training challenge fund via Renfrewshire Council. It has also received support from Scottish Enterprise Renfrewshire. Some senior staff are taking the Modern Apprenticeship in management, and others have taken the SVQ4 in training and development.
The Cairellot management team are about to develop a new building, which will house a community nursery, out-of-school care and training suite. They say they plan to build a website and hope to offer on-line learning.
Last September, the partners organised a celebration of achievement day at which the nursery was re-accredited with Investors in People and Scottish Quality Management Systems. Wendy Alexander attended, alongside Sheila Cronin, the head of lifelong learning at Renfrewshire Council and Kirk Ramsay, the director of lifelong learning at the Scottish University for Industry, who presented Ms Elliot and Ms Cairns with their certificates for the owner-manager SVQ4. Cairellot is also accredited as a Scottish University for Industry learning centre.
Ms Elliot said the owner-manager qualification had helped her and Ms Cairns re-evaluate how they worked with staff and help them make more decisions. 'It's taken a lot of pressures off us. Sickness rates have gone down and it's improved retention.
'Our business success would not be there if it wasn't for the staff, so we decided to hold a celebration of achievement. We had a really glitzy night and I think it raised all the staff's self-esteem. We invited all the families too. When Ann and I started the nursery we had to re-mortgage our homes, so our husbands had to be very brave!'
